Tuesday, January 21, 2014

In my book "The President's Mortician" I refer to a cabal of rich, powerful men as the Secret American Empire for good reason. It is my contention that this cabal has controlled events from behind the scenes to enrich themselves at the expense of the stability of American democracy. It began before and during World War II. Prescott Bush (grandfather of George W. Bush), Allen Dulles, John J. McCloy, and Averill Harriman were partners with Nazi backers in profiting from Hitler's rise to power.

The U.S. firms were Brown Brothers Harriman and the Union Banking Corporation of New York. They funneled money through their Nazi contact in Germany, Fritz Thyssen.
Thyssen's corporate empire included Silesian Steel and Coal, which got rich by financing Hitler's war machine. Silesian made use of slave labor from Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The Bush/Thyssen partnership also owned I.G. Farben which produced the deadly Zyklon B gas used to kill millions in the death camps. The owners and directors of Farben could have been, and should have been, tried and hanged for war crimes. According to the British publication The Guardian, "...[their] business dealings, which continued until [the] company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading With The Enemy Act, have led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz."

OSS operative Allen Dulles, later CIA Director, was a known Nazi collaborator. He regularly communicated with Nazi hierarchy in the 1930s, and he signed his letters "Heil Hitler." After the war Dulles hired hundreds of Nazi war criminals to work for the U.S. in intelligence, aerospace engineering, military weapons manufacturing, and medical research. Two of the most prominent Nazis he hired were Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger who were responsible for building and firing the deadly V-2 rockets. They worked thousands of slave laborers to death at Mittelwerk factories in the construction of the V-2, and they should have been prosecuted after the war. Dulles saw to it that they were given safe haven.

McCloy protected the Secret American Empire's profits by intervening to block President Roosevelt's orders to bomb strategic Nazi installations during the war. According to the Guardian, "...the American Air Force could have destroyed the camps with air raids, as well as the railroad bridges and railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz [but] a January 1944 executive order signed by Roosevelt was ignored because of pressure brought by Brown Brothers Harriman." BBH's lawyer was John J. McCloy, and its board members included Prescott Bush and Allen Dulles.

BBH was so powerful that it was able to hide the true nature of its Nazi ties for decades. As Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles developed close alliances with American media moguls like Henry Luce, William Paley, and A. H. Sulzberger. The CIA's atrocities went uninvestigated, and they continued unabated during the Cold War.

Fast forward to 1963. President Kennedy, secretly at war with the CIA and publicly critical of secret societies, is shot to death in Dallas. His successor, LBJ, perhaps the most vile and corrupt President in our history, appoints Allen Dulles and John J. McCloy to the commission charged with investigating Kennedy's death. Not surprisingly, Dulles and McCloy decide that it is the work of lone nut; there is no conspiracy and no political significance is attached to the deed.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

There is a stunning paper trail, beginning with the November 25, 1963, memo from Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach (reprinted in its entirety below) to LBJ aide Bill Moyers, which documents the Johnson administration's desperation to cover up the truth of JFK's assassination. LBJ was fearful that any honest investigation would lead right back to him and his co-conspirators, so he consulted with his great pal J. Edgar Hoover on the best way to proceed. The first move was to draft a memo advising his underlings on how to squelch rumors, disseminate disinformation, and answer glaring holes in the official story.

Katzenbach, who served the Kennedys well and seemed to be a capable assistant AG, easily caved into Johnson's demands. In all likelihood, Johnson presented Katzenbach with some cover story like, "If the public finds out that it was the Communists behind this, we're going to have nuclear war where millions are killed." At that early date, three days after the assassination, no one knew the full story of Kennedy's death, so the memo cannot be interpreted in any other way than to say it was an attempt to conceal the truth at all costs. Here is the full text of the memo:

Memo from Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, Deputy Attorney General

November 25, 1963

MEMORANDUM FOR MR. MOYERS

It is important that all of the facts surrounding President Kennedy's Assassination be made public in a way which will satisfy people in the United States and abroad that all the facts have been told and that a statement to this effect be made now.

1. The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.

2. Speculation about Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists. Unfortunately the facts on Oswald seem about too pat-- too obvious (Marxist, Cuba, Russian wife, etc.). The Dallas police have put out statements on the Communist conspiracy theory, and it was they who were in charge when he was shot and thus silenced.

3. The matter has been handled thus far with neither dignity nor conviction. Facts have been mixed with rumour and speculation. We can scarcely let the world see us totally in the image of the Dallas police when our President is murdered.

I think this objective may be satisfied by making public as soon as possible a complete and thorough FBI report on Oswald and the assassination. This may run into the difficulty of pointing to in- consistencies between this report and statements by Dallas police officials. But the reputation of the Bureau is such that it may do the whole job. The only other step would be the appointment of a Presidential Commission of unimpeachable personnel to review and examine the evidence and announce its conclusions. This has both advantages and disadvantages. It think it can await publication of the FBI report and public reaction to it here and abroad.

I think, however, that a statement that all the facts will be made public property in an orderly and responsible way should be made now. We need something to head off public speculation or Congressional hearings of the wrong sort.

Saturday, January 4, 2014

If you have not read, or are unaware of, OpEd News, I highly recommend the site as a source of alternative news and opinion. I have submitted several articles for the site over the past few years, and many other authors/writers have published incisive and compelling material. Recently I read a fascinating piece by investigative historian Eric Zuesse. I have reprinted it here:

"Conservatives support privatizing schools, prisons, hospitals, and other social services. The privatization-mania is also increasingly occurring in higher education, as conservatives in Congress push measures to raise the percentage of colleges that are owned by for-profit corporations, and to decrease the percentage that are either public or nonprofit.

The argument given for such privatization is that corporations are more efficient because they are 'the free market' way of serving people's needs. However, progressives argue to the contrary, that in these parts of the economy, where 'profits' for the public are hard if not impossible to measure, government does a better and less-inefficient job than corporations do. And, now, even a conservative state's governor seems to have switched to the latter conclusion.

On 3 January 2014, the AP reported an instance in which the Republican Governor of one of the three most-Republican states in the U.S., Idaho, is doing a 180-degree turn, and he announced that 'the corrections department will take over operation of the largest privately-run prison in the state,' from Corrections Corporation of America. The AP's Rebecca Boone, in Boise, reported, that, whereas 'In 2008, he floated legislation to change state laws to allow private companies to build and operate prisons in Idaho," he now is taking over operation of this CCA prison, because of "mismanagement and other problems at the facility.' Only a few months before, on September 16th, that same reporter had headlined 'CCA in contempt for prison understaffing,' and she quoted the federal judge's order, which said that, 'For CCA staff to lie on so basic a point -- whether an officer is actually at a post -- leaves the Court with serious concerns about compliance in other respects, such as whether every violent incident is reported.' The judge found that CCA was lying because they wanted more of their income from the state to go toward boosting their bottom line for stockholders, and less of it to go toward feeding the prisoners and protecting them from each other. The judge's order said, 'If a prospective fine leads to $2.4 million in penalties, CCA has no one to blame but itself.' CCA had been caught by the judge in persistently lying to the state while shortchanging prisoners on the prison's obligation to provide basic services to inmates. The tension between private profits versus public services was clear in this case. CCA had incentive to cheat inmates in order to raise profits, and now a federal judge was fining CCA for doing precisely that.

Similarly, countries such as France, Sweden, UK, and the OECD generally, where health care is entirely or largely provided by the government, have better health-care outcomes and far lower healthcare costs, on a per-person basis, than does the U.S., where the profit motive in medical care is far more encouraged.

However, many Americans prefer the privatization of government services, because they believe that such a movement toward 'shrinking big government' is in the direction of greater freedom, and is the only ethical direction, a direction in favor of greater democracy, in accord with the U.S. Constitution. Though the U.S. Constitution is by no means a free-market document, and concerns political issues instead of economic ones, there is a strong belief, especially among conservatives, that it is primarily about economics. There is consequently a myth about privatization.

The Myth About Privatization: Privatization was introduced by two democracies, the USA and UK, in the 1980s, not by prior fascist regimes.

The Truth About Privatization: Privatization was, in fact, a big aim of the elite fascists, right from the very start of fascism.

Explanation of the Reality: Aristocrats control the private wealth. Privatization means that they get to control also what was previously public. Privatization moreover provides corrupt politicians (their politicians) an opportunity to pay off their contributors (themselves) by offering them an inside track on public-asset sales. So, it's not surprising that privatization is the way of fascist countries.

Documentation of the Reality: In September 2009, the European University Institute issued their RSCAS_2009_46.pdf, titled 'From Public to Private: Privatization in 1920's Fascist Italy,' (subsequently retitled 'The First Privatization: Selling SOEs' in the 2011 Cambridge Journal of Economics) by Germa Bel, who said in her summary: 'Privatization was an important policy in Italy in 1922-1925. The Fascist government was alone in transferring State ownership and services to private firms in the 1920s; no other country in the world would engage in such a policy until Nazi Germany did so between 1934 and 1937.' Then, in the February 2010 Economic History Review, she headlined a study specifically about the German case, 'Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in 1930s Germany.' Here, she reported that, though 'privatizations in [fascist] Chile [under Pinochet] and the UK, which began to be implemented in the 1970s and 1980s, are usually considered the first privatization policies in modern history, ... none of the contemporary economic analyses of privatization takes into account an important, earlier case: the privatization policy implemented by the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in Germany. ... Although modern economic literature usually fails to notice it, the Nazi government in 1930s Germany implemented a large-scale privatization policy.' Furthermore, 'Germany was alone in developing a policy of privatization in the mid-1930s,' since Italy had finished its privatizations by then.

The purposes of these privatizations, in both cases, were chiefly 'receipts from selling' the assets to finance rearmament, and also "the desire to increase support from" the major aristocrats (such as, in Germany, the armaments-making firms of the Thyssens, the Krupps, and the Flicks), who received sweet deals on these assets.

Much later, of course, Russia under Boris Yeltsin also privatized, while that nation switched from being communist, to becoming fascist. (Yeltsin was no fascist himself; he wasn't intelligent enough to be anything, ideologically. He was just confused, mistaken.) China later did the same thing, when it, too, switched from being communist to being fascist.

Connection to Privatization in the U.S: To continue with prisons as the case: Huffington Post, on 22 October 2013, headlined a major investigative news report 'Private Prison Empire Rises Despite Startling Record of Juvenile Abuse,' and reporter Chris Kirkham found rampant political paybacks in the privatizations of juvenile prisons. As a typical example of the consequences: Florida's 'sweeping privatization of its juvenile incarceration system has produced some of the worst re-offending rates in the nation. More than 40 percent of youth offenders sent to one of Florida's juvenile prisons wind up arrested and convicted of another crime within a year of their release, according to state data. In New York state, where historically no youth offenders have been held in private institutions, 25 percent are convicted again within that timeframe.' Those children in Florida are experiencing the brunt of fascism. But so are taxpayers."

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.